


we blame the night for the dark (for the ghosts)

by brophigenia



Series: emptiness [2]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: F/M, Frottage, Infidelity, M/M, offscreen major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-06
Updated: 2017-11-06
Packaged: 2019-01-30 02:57:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12644739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: On the divan that long-lost winter night they'd moved together roughly, friction that felt like stoking a fire higher and higher in the places they had pressed together, their kisses like fucking sunshine, like they were sweating gunpowder. Alexander had been too free with his teeth, keen and razory around the edges, eager to lay claim to something that was his and yet should not be. He was proving everyone wrong even if they'd never know it, never see beneath his careful Laurens' collar.Oh, my love, he thinks.





	we blame the night for the dark (for the ghosts)

**Author's Note:**

> Uhhhhh you guys seemed to like the last one, so here, have this. Sorry in advance. Let me know what you think. Did you like it or 'wolves' better?

The War is seven kinds of hell. 

Wait, no. 

The War  _ had been  _ seven kinds of hell. Over now, though-- over for so long. 

It's easy to forget that, in the wee hours of the morning when he wakes from yet more endless fevered dreams positing how he'll meet his end. They come with even more frequency as he ages; he thinks that the dreams where he dies in grey-haired obscurity face down on a pile of illegibly inked ravings are even more horrifying than his memories of bloody battlefields superimposed upon the present day, visions of dying in a crush of blood and shit and mud. 

(He remembers the canonfire the most vividly; nothing in the world sounds like canonfire.) 

The War was seven kinds of hell-- they'd all been three-quarters starved to death and rotting their guts with cheap whiskey to ignore the fear and the hunger, holes in their bootsoles and the elbows of their once-fine blue coats. 

Death (and the visceral stench of it) hung around at all hours, curling skeletal, icy fingers around their wrists and throats in moments of idleness as if to renew their frenetic machinations; as if to refuel their determination, vital cogs in the clockwork of war. 

And then there was Laurens. 

And  _ oh my love,  _ he thinks, always, in times like these, when he lies in the dark calling up the man’s ever-blurring visage in his mind. 

(Once he'd sent a letter written in the middle of the night, fevered by some idea or another and on a writing binge, tongue loose and attached to his pen, umbilical, addressing him as  _ my dearest, Laurens,  _ purposeful with the comma in a way he'd not been in the years since _. _ ) 

He thinks of the last time, with Laurens’ hair prison-short and only curling at the very ends, thighs spread and throat long and bare (and bruised from the fervent press of Alexander’s teeth) above his opened, ragged cravat. 

He’d been married then, and the only person in his bed for the last months ( _ cold _ months, winter made springtime with the sweet warmth of Eliza Schuyler in his sheets) had been his wife— his  _ wife,  _ the word yet novel to him. 

Seeing Laurens in such dishevelment, such  _ malnourishment _ , had broken him open, made him see his— made him see  _ John  _ laid over the image of his mother, wasting away, eyes bright with hunger and the edges of a fever just from moving too much, putting forth too much effort for his already-taxed body. He’d not been the strong young society huntsman that he’d been before the war, nor the grinning embodiment of bloodlust he’d been during their tenure together as the General’s  _ aide-de-camps _ . He’d been  _ fragile _ , closer to the skittish does that Alexander coaxed into drawing rooms when he was still playing the feral tomcat than the quick-heartbeated stag he’d been in the hallway during the first time they’d given into the physical embodiment of their feelings. 

(And  _ oh,  _ what feelings! Lust and rage and tenderness and pure, complete  _ love  _ such as he’d never known before, had never known since. Laurens had been  _ everything-  _ he’d been  _ everything,  _ and now Alexander is left to eke what happiness he can out of this life without him, bereft. And he  _ loves _ his wife— he loves her and he wishes he never was her husband, if only to spare her the pain that loving him has wrought.) 

He’d pressed Laurens into the divan, had curled his hands around the other man’s stubbled cheeks, hushed because they were occupying his parlor, the fire raging at his back and his wife, sweet black-eyed E _ li _ za, asleep in their bed upstairs, the maid scrubbing pots in the kitchen down the hall. 

Laurens had trembled, his forearms still corded with muscle but lacking their usual healthy sun-dark color, drawing him closer with hands fisted in his fine green velvet vest.  _ Peacock,  _ Laurens half-gasped, half-laughed, breath huffing against his cheek.  _ Alexander,  _ he whispered in the silence that followed, the final syllable a bitten-off thing, like he was cutting himself off from speaking further. 

Alexander had been half-mad with desperation and kissed him then, cut off whatever words may have found the courage to come up, half-thinking with an addled brain that there would be time enough for all of that later— that any moment they’d be interrupted and denied this, this ambrosia that would stave off his  _ hunger  _ for the months of separation sure to come. Laurens was released from prison, and the war was nearly won, and soon enough they’d both be sitting at the General’s right hand side, himself running the treasury or the state department and Laurens surely given some position where he’d be able to bring rights to  _ all  _ American citizens. Wearing togas, as it were, hanging up their swords, like he’d written in that final letter. 

(Did Laurens receive that final letter? Did he read those words and make similar plans in his mind? Did he imagine their children growing up the closest of boon companions, their wives learning to be confidantes, their townhouses right next to each other? Hamilton  _ still _ imagined such things, as if he could turn back the hands of time as easily as he wound the grandfather clock each night.) 

Every night since Eliza had brought him Henry Laurens’ letter, he imagined what Laurens had been about to say. 

He remains, where Laurens does not. 

He is Achilles, left abandoned, standing over the broken corpse of his Patroclus, raging. Weeping. Insensate. 

He is all of those things, except worse— because he cannot take up his sword again to take his revenge in pounds of flesh and quarts of blood. There are no Trojans to massacre and no Troy to burn. He was first expected to treat with and then to speak civilly of that nation across the sea that signed his beloved’s death warrant the day they sent their lobsterbacks across the Atlantic. Now he is expected to smile and speak jovially, if a touch wistfully, or his  _ dearest friend.  _ To raise a glass to the man’s memory, perhaps, once every few years. 

On the divan that long-lost winter night they’d moved together roughly, friction that felt like stoking a fire higher and higher in the places they had pressed together, their kisses like fucking  _ sunshine,  _ like they were sweating gunpowder. Alexander had been too free with his teeth, keen and razory around the edges, eager to lay claim to something that was  _ his  _ and yet should not be. He was proving everyone wrong even if they’d never know it, never see beneath his careful love’s collar. 

_ Oh, my love,  _ he thinks, after he leaves Eliza ( _ best of wives and best of women,  _ to be  _ certain,  _ to say the  _ least _ , but not the best of loves he’d ever known) asleep in their bed in the wee hours of the morning, stopping by the small room that was once their parlor and was repurposed into an office after Angelica was born to run his fingers over the faded upholstery on the couch that Eliza never understood his attachment to, reverent like a pilgrim might touch a scrap of the shroud of Jesus himself. 

It is warm outside, when he can finally tear himself away, despite that it’s not yet dawn. 

He makes haste; he has to meet Pendleton at the docks. 


End file.
